Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Boot Camp

I attended the Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure boot camp held between 12th and 14th at Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The agenda of the boot camp included a series of presentations and labs based on the major products in the 2012 R2 release which are Windows Server, SCVMM, Operations Manager, Azure Pack, Orchestration Manager etc. The trainer was Leon Sayers from ‘You say IT’. My main motive was to meet with Service Providers who are one of our target customers and also learn about the 2012 R2 release.

The representatives from the Service Providers were all IT administrators, the guys who are really well versed with technology. Windows Server 2012 is still new in terms of adoption; most of the folks in the session were there to learn about the latest offering from Microsoft as their plans included launching an IaaS cloud soon. The Service Providers were already offering services like Email, Websites, Domain Names, Share Point etc., but not yet Virtual Machines.

The sessions were well planned and delivered with a number of labs. These labs helped us quickly get familiar with the concepts delivered in the theoretical sessions. Though most of the sessions were well received, the response to sessions related to the REST API support in the 2012 R2 release was lukewarm. To a question on why the interest level was low, one of the participants said that “the REST API knowledge is important for developers and not us”.

I was also seeing a lukewarm response to the labs where execution of some configuration items involved writing PowerShell scripts.

So, my takeaways from the sessions were:

The 2012 R2 release has really upped the ante in the battle with the vCloud / vCenter suite. The feature support now looks at par with Windows Server 2012 R2 coming up trumps in many categories

The adoption of this newest platform is still at its infancy, it will be at least a few quarters before we see large scale deployments.

The Service Provider community is heavy with IT administrator skills, but their interest or knowledge of the API support is low.

Most tasks at the Service Providers were done manually, with very little automation.

A few questions for the readers:

Have you started deployments with the 2012 R2 release? If no, what is the time-frame?

Do IT administrators at your organizations use Power Shell / Scripts / APIs to automate tasks?